Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked secrets about widespread surveillance, has spoken to the press for the first time since getting asylum in Russia. New York Times reporter James Risen talked to the whistleblower through "encrypted online communications" over the course of the last week.

Snowden maintained that his leaks helped, rather than hurt, US security. “The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure,” he told the paper.

Snowden went on to insist that the documents were leaked only to journalists, and there was a "zero percent chance" any had fallen into the hands of the Russian or Chinese governments.

Currently, Snowden said the documents are in the hands of the journalists he has worked with, and he doesn't even have a copy of any of them. Snowden wanted to be "divorced from the decision-making of publication," he said. "Technical solutions were in place to make sure the work of the journalists couldn't be interfered with."

He also disputed a negative note in his CIA personnel file that was reported last week in the NYT. Snowden said that negative notation was the result of a "petty e-mail spat" with a senior manager.

The retaliation for this petty spat was one of the things that convinced Snowden to become a leaker and persuaded him that seeking change from the inside would prove futile. Any efforts at reporting wrongdoing “would have been buried forever,” he told the NYT, and Snowden would “have been discredited and ruined.” He added “the system does not work” since “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.”

The decision to take action built up gradually, he said. Snowden finally chose to leak after seeing an inspector general's report on the warrantless wiretapping program, he told the Times. The report was from 2009, but Snowden wouldn't say when he read it.

"[P]rograms that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack... legitimacy, and that’s a problem," he said. "It also represents a dangerous normalization of ‘governing in the dark,’ where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.”